Pilar Corrias Gallery is pleased to present Throb, the first exhibition by Swiss artist Urban Zellweger in the UK.

The pulse of a heartbeat monitor, a human figure, joined at the head to a lion. Or is it a dog? It’s not quite clear what it is. But it’s repeated three times within the exhibition, which makes me feel like I know it somehow, that I can relate. But to what exactly? The figure screaming at a computer screen. The person looking in to the distance. These seem like familiar enough situations on their own. But taken together, they seem less unique but more comprehensible as well.

That many of these motifs are also shrouded behind an opalescent white paint adds to their legitimacy. They entice me to look closer, to invest effort, in the hopes of grasping something hidden. But that may just be wishful thinking. It might just be as it seems.

My indecision makes me anxious. The painting ‘Yes/N0’ only heightens my confusion. The porous text suggests a kind of transitory decision. The barrier of wood and steel is ineffective, but still an obstacle. Obscured in the distance is the outline of a castle. I would look closer were it not for the solemn face staring back at me. Set in the doorframe, and with a bolt for an eye, it projects a transformative yet contradictory state.

Many of the figures and motifs in these works are stuck in transition. Figures and objects straddle foreground and background. Spaces go back and forth in time. But these transitory states are often marked by humorous complications; Zellweger’s stick men accidentally biting one another or a cat biking fervently to nowhere. The characters appear as if unwitting players in a comedy of errors.